When it comes to storage, there are plenty of controllers out there for you to choose. Most of the time, you don't even need to buy additional hard drive controllers as motherboards these days comes with huge amounts of SATA connectors, some even as many as 10 or more, also offering plenty of RAID options.

In previous years, additional controllers were somewhat of a must, as motherboards didn't come with too many IDE or SATA connectors as they do these days and if they did, they didn't necessarily always come with RAID support or much of it. If you wanted huge amount of storage space capabilities, that meant spending extra dollars on an add-on controller card. HighPoint Technologies is one company who has been making these types of products for a long time, over 10 years to be more precise and they've doing quite a good job of it. We have reviewed many controllers from HighPoint in the past, all designed especially for different uses and varying price points. Some are great for home users who simply want to add in a couple extra drives, some expand on it with vast RAID options and others are much more advanced and expensive with server-class features.

Today we are going to take a close look at one of HighPoint's very latest controllers and it's one of the most impressive ones we've looked at so far, the RocketRAID 2340. Coming in at a little under $500 USD, it's certainly not a cheap product but its feature list is neither short. Using special Mini-SAS connectors, it allows you to add up to an extra 16 SATA or SATA II hard drives to your system and run in a range of different RAID modes including 0, 1, 5, 10, 50 and JBOD. In fact, it has not just one but two controller chips on the card, which is powered by the PCI Express x8 slot for plenty of bandwidth throughput for extreme storage requirements.

Clearly it is designed more for small to medium-sized businesses with quite serious storage requirements. If you've got some cash to spend and are looking for a high-end controller card, which currently gives you the ability to store at least a whooping 12,000 gigabytes of data, using a total of 16 x 750GB drives (I just hope you have a monster-sized case...), you've come to the right place! Let's get started and take a close look at the RocketRAID 2340 product from HPT and see if it is worth the asking price and just how it performs against other recent onboard motherboard controllers in RAID 0 and non-RAID environments.

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